Several years of design, development and testing came together today for the release of KDE 4.0. This is our most significant release in our 11 year history and marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the start of the KDE 4 era. Join us now in #kde4-release-party on Freenode to celebrate or come to the release event in person next week. Packages are available for all the major distributions with live CDs available currently from Kubuntu and openSUSE. Read on for details or take the KDE 4.0 Visual Guide to find your way around.

The KDE 4.0 desktop

The KDE 4 Libraries have seen major improvements in almost all areas.
The Phonon multimedia framework provides platform independent multimedia support to all
KDE applications, the Solid hardware integration framework makes interacting with
(removable) devices easier and provides tools for better powermanagement.

The KDE 4 Desktop has gained some major new capabilities. The Plasma desktop shell
offers a new desktop interface, including panel, menu and widgets on the desktop
as well as a dashboard function. KWin, the KDE Window manager, now supports advanced
graphical effects to ease interaction with your windows.

Lots of KDE Applications have seen improvements as well. Visual updates through
vector-based artwork, changes in the underlying libraries, user interface
enhancements, new features, even new applications -- you name it, KDE 4.0 has it.
Okular, the new document viewer and Dolphin, the new filemanager are only two
applications that leverage KDE 4.0's new technologies.

The Oxygen Artwork team provides a breath of fresh air on the desktop.
Nearly all user-visible parts of the KDE desktop and applications have been given a
facelift. Beauty and consistency are two of the basic concepts behind Oxygen.

Distributions known to have packages:

An alpha version of KDE4-based Arklinux 2008.1 is expected
shortly after this release, with an expected final release within 3 or 4 weeks.

Debian KDE 4.0 packages are available in the experimental branch.
The KDE Development Platform will even make it into Lenny. Watch for
announcements by the Debian KDE Team.

Fedora will feature KDE 4.0 in Fedora 9, to be released
in April, with Alpha releases being available from
24th of January. KDE 4.0 packages are in the pre-alpha Rawhide repository.

Kubuntu packages are included in the upcoming "Hardy Heron"
(8.04) and also made available as updates for the stable "Gutsy Gibbon" (7.10).
A Live CD is available for trying out KDE 4.0.
More details can be found in the
announcement on kubuntu.org.

Mandriva will provide packages for2008.0 and aims
at producing a Live CD with the latest snapshot of 2008.1.

but in a nutshell: With the release of 4.0.0, and in light of the existence of OpenSUSE's build service which can satisfy people's curiosity about KDE on the run up to 4.1, the KDE4Daily will not receive any more updates.

I intend to post a quick "KDE4Daily post-mortem" to the KDE developer lists to see if they think it has been of benefit to KDE (there have been a handful of "false" bug reports arising from KDE4Daily) and to ask whether they would like to see it return in the run up to 4.1.0. I'll post the outcome on the homepage in due course.

I'd like to take a moment to thank everyone who helped out with the project and, repeating what I said in the notes for the final KDE4Daily revision, making my first contribution to KDE so pleasant :)

Would be great if this continued, I am not going to install KDE4.0 because I do not consider I usable in a productive environment, but I would like keep tracking the progress (hoping that KDE 4.1 or 4.2 on day be ok)

many of the things on that list got done, including: okular superceding many of the smaller unmaintained apps in its area of expertise; kedit going away and kate going to kdesdk; the games project did an awesome job here going through every single app very effectively; kpersonalizer is gone; kcontrol replaced; rss is now handled by libsyndicate (though kdepim apps still aren't all ported to it afaik); ksysguard moved into the right places (including being made into a library); krdc has been revamped ... etc. there are some things that didn't get addressed, particularly in areas where the turbulence has been in lower levels (e.g. multimedia with phonon, kdepim with akonadi) .. but we hit a significant number of those goals on that page, which is pretty impressive given that some of that stuff was written by people who may not actually be active contributors to the project ;)

"Asinine" is your opinion, which is fine. My humble opinion is that it is Trolltech who should be (and I am sure are) thinking about Qt licensing upgrade in the near future. After all, KPlayer is not the only Qt based project with a licensing conflict due to Qt incompatibility with GPLv3.

Hats off big time to everyone who made this possible. I have followed the entire development process through Planet KDE, and am very confident that with all the skilled and talented people out there, KDE 4 will grow to become something seriously awesome.

So all you guys (coders, translators, writers, PR folks, everyone involved) should definitely crack open a cold one and celebrate, this is your moment and you've earned it! Again, hats off to all of you!

I am sharing you happiness and I hope KDE will be successfull as the KDE 3 Series now is. But I also hope it will become more configurable as it is now :(. This blessedly is the only big downer i found yet. I have not investigated this for later Versions.
So i am looking forward to the see what you guys make out of it.